..... of an affliction so severe that it significantly restricts a person’s ability to function fully, a crater in the mind so deep that no one can responsibly suggest it would surely go away if those victims would just square their shoulders and think more positively.....
Jeffrey R. Holland

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Pain

If the pain were readily describable most of the sufferers from this ancient affliction would have able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones, even their physicians some of the actual dimension of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking.Such incomprehension has usually been due, not to a failure of sympathy, but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience. For myself, the pain is most closely connected to drowning or suffocation – but even those images are off the mark.

To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression.

William Styron

Pain, from Depression is not like a toothache, or broken bone or some other injuries that cause us to feel serious pain, but there is absolutely a terrible feeling of pain. I could not point to a spot on my body and say, “This is where the pain is!” But it is constant.

Could it be described using some other words? I have looked up every variation of words like pain, torment, lake of fire and brimstone, and so on, but nothing properly described the feeling.

I have been sick before, sometimes with great pain, but you know that sometime in the near future you will recover and the pain will leave. Your doctor has given assurance, and probably just important, you may be comforted by someone who has also experienced your sickness.

From the onset of the sickness through recovery, somehow you know that others sympathize with your condition, that no one is criticizing you for not handling the pain in a more mature way, or perhaps suggesting to others that maybe it is just a fake, just to get out of some responsibility, just doesn’t want to share the load, or is it just another away to get sympathy?

The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the fore knowledge that no remedy will come – not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that is only temporary, more pain will follow. In virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar deviations would be lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting.

William Styron

A bright and seasoned oncologist, Dr. Ford has at close range watched many patients endure chemotherapy and cancer’s other terrors. Asked what the treatment is like for the people involved, the doctor says quite honestly, “I have no concept. It really can’t be described unless you have gone through it.” And even those that have been there cannot really explainNeil Maxwell